I absolutely adore Ultimate Chicken Horse on the Nintendo Switch, its method in which it made a side-scrolling platformer truly competitive an ingenious blending of chaos and building that helped it stand out from other examples of the genre (even Mario himself) that simply had multiplayer mean, ‘play the game but with more of you on screen.’ It also certainly helped that developer Clever Endeavour continued to support the game with plenty of fun updates in the years that followed, adding more characters to laugh at, stages to tackle and obstacles to devilishly unleash on your opponents.
If you spent many an evening building stages and trying to screw over your friends in Ultimate Chicken Horse like I did, then you’ll feel right at home here, Ultimate Sheep Raccoon framed around much the same premise, only this time whilst riding motorbikes instead of running around on your own two feet. Things are kept nice and simple on the control front, players able to roll their bikes back and forth, tilt their animal, bunny hop and make use of specific objects to swing and grind with the press of a button.
As was the case with Ultimate Chicken Horse, games play out in rounds, each one kicking off with a random assortment of ramps and obstacles for players to fight over and add to the racing environment, either offering helping hands or nightmarish walls to overcome. Items placed, everyone then does their best to cross the finish line first on their bike (or at the very least make it to the finish line at all), points then handed out based on performance. When a player hits the required point target, they win. Essentially, think of it as Ultimate Chicken Horse meets the Trials series.
The selection of goodies to litter the stage includes a range of ramps and platforms as well as a host of more mischievous items sure to make life a lot more difficult not only for the other racers but yourself too. Electrifying television sets, slingshotting frogs, grinding rails, sofas on spinning mechanisms, and a few more weird and wonderful contraptions make for an entertaining time to experiment with and make use of. As was the case before, the key to winning comes down to placing things within a stage so that they cause problems for your opponents but don’t prevent you from overcoming them and crossing the finish line. A chaotic balance for sure.
Players will get to upgrade their animal with power-ups multiple times in a competition, these including the likes of double jumping, jet packing and mine dropping. They’re an awesome new addition that add even more unexpected chaos to the mix and keep things exciting.
The stages themselves are pretty straightforward, often large chasms between your animals and the finish line, which is slightly disappointin,g especially when compared with the ideas and gimmicks offered in Ultimate Chicken Horse. There you would need to contend with huge waves, elevators and blackouts, whilst here things feel far more simplified when it comes to unique elements. Of course, adding your own objects plays a rather large role in creating the game’s hilarious moments, but it’d be nice to see some of those previous ideas make a return.
With support for up to eight racers at a time, Ultimate Sheep Raccoon is the perfect party game, the screen busy with animals soaring around on their bikes without things becoming too much so. It should come as little surprise, then, that the game excels as a multiplayer experience both on and offline, but lacks in the single player department, options limited to building your own stages for others to test their speed or take on those found online. If you have friends to enjoy the game with, then Ultimate Sheep Raccoon is a no-brainer. If not, then it’s worth bearing in mind its limitations for you.
Ultimate Sheep Raccoon manages to take the original game’s formula and mould it around a Trails-like experience. While it does feel a little light on the content side of things, I’ve no doubt we’ll see similar levels of support from Clever Endeavour going forward that’ll help turn this entertaining romp into another multiplayer hit with true longevity.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Clever Endeavour Games
